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On April 15th, 2014 the moon will be eclipsed by the shadow of the earth. This marks the first of four eclipses occurring about 6 months part, called an eclipse tetrad. The last tetrad was a decade ago, and the next is not due until 2032.
The best eclipse visibility will be from North America and parts of South America. A team of GLORIA astronomers will celebrate this astronomical spectacle with a live broadcast from the city of Cusco, Peru, in the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Throughout Europe, totality will not be visible. However the Teide volcano, at 3718m altitude on the island of Tenerife, offers an intriguing observational prospect. When a total lunar eclipse occurs close to sunrise or sunset at Teide, the shadow of the volcano aligns perfectly with the eclipsed moon. This unique phenomenon will be observable during the eclipse of April 15th and will be broadcast live.

Image of M82 and SN 2014J obtained with the D50 telescope on January 25th, 2014.

The nearest type Ia supernova in 400 years has been found in the Messier 82 (M82) galaxy. First spotted on 21 January 2014, it is relatively close to Earth, about 11.4 million light years away!
This supernova is called SN2014J (the 10th supernova discovered so far during 2014), and is a rare kind. “Type Ia” supernovae (SNe) are believed to be caused by exploding white dwarf stars. These SNe explode with very predictable brightnesses, making them ideal ‘standard candles’ to measure distances to galaxies accurately.

Now that it has reached maximum brightness, around Jan 31 (with a magnitude in the R band of about 10), GLORIA will keep monitoring the SN2014J light-curve (along with other supernovae) for the next few months as part of the regular program conducted by some of the GLORIA partners. Indeed, many astronomical observatories worldwide (including space-borne facilities) will point to this unique target regularly over the coming weeks.

Image of M82 and SN 2014J (M81 galaxy on the right) obtained with the BART telescope wide field camera on January 25th, 2014.

The birthday for someone, the graduation day for someone else. The day of your first kiss, or your first day of employment, or maybe the day of your last cigarette. Our lives are punctuated by memorable moments. But how was the sky directly above your head at those significant personal moments?

“Personal Space” is there to answer the question.
A free web-based application developed within the GLORIA project by Irish artist Emer O Boyle and astronomers Lorraine Hanlon, Martin Topinka (University College Dublin), and Robert Simpson (University of Oxford). Personal Space is an art science collaboration, one of a growing number of projects that re-connects the expertise of artists and scientists.

It turns the celestial sphere into a huge, boundless social network. Establishing direct and personal connections to the universe by linking significant events in your own life with what was above you in the sky at that moment. And with people all around the world who shared that portion of the sky with you.

“I am an astronomer, I have lots of reasons for looking at different bits of the sky. But what is the bit of the sky that is most obvious for people to look at? I am told by non-astronomer friends that you want to look directly up», said Robert Simpson. «So what is directly above my head right now? That is the idea behind Personal Space».

ESA’s Gaia mission will create the most accurate map yet of the Milky Way. By making accurate measurements of the positions and motions of 1% of the total population of roughly 100 billion stars, it will answer questions about the origin and evolution of our home Galaxy. The Soyuz launcher, operated by Arianespace lifted off at 09:12 GMT on Dec 19 with Gaia on board. A few hours after, one of the GLORIA telescopes, the Pi-of-the-Sky-North experiment at the BOOTES-1 astronomical station at ESAt/INTA-CEDEA in Huelva (Spain), recorded the spacecraft on its route towards an orbit around a gravitationally-stable virtual point in space called L2, some 1.5 million kilometres from Earth in the direction opposite to the Sun.

Michael Perryman was the scientific leader of ESA’s Hipparcos space astrometry mission, and with Lennart Lindegren from Sweden, one of the two originators of the Gaia mission. Michael is currently Bohdan Paczynski Visiting Fellow at the School of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton and Adjunct Professor in the School of Physics, University College Dublin. Here he shares his ringside view of the launch.

19 December 2013: Today, at 06:12 local time here in French Guiana, the Gaia satellite was delivered into orbit, on its way to its surveying location, the Sun-Earth Lagrange point L2. So began the latest and most revolutionary journey in the history of the measurement of the positions of the stars. Placed in orbit by the 1812th launch of the vast Russian Soyuz programme (their 6th from French Guiana), Gaia marks the 40th launch for ESA, and the 25th scientific satellite lofted by Arianespace. To wish it well on its historic journey were a representation of Gaia scientists, ESA project managers and engineers headed by ESA’s Director of Science Alvaro Gimenez, industrial leaders, national delegates to ESA, and senior representatives from numerous other fields of the increasingly ambitious European space programme.

Gaia first appeared as a proposal for consideration in ESA’s space programme in 1993, hot on the heels of ESA’s revolutionary Hipparcos star-mapping mission launched in 1989. Seven years of careful study led to its acceptance by ESA’s Science Programme Committee in 2000, with a target launch date of 2012. Maintaining such an aggressive schedule, for such an ambitious mission at the forefront of so many areas of space technology, is almost unheard of. Managed by ESA, with manufacture, integration and testing contracted to the mission’s prime contractor, Astrium Toulouse, the Gaia industrial consortium comprised 47 European and three US industrial partners. It will map the stars at unprecedented and almost incomprehensible levels of accuracy. The largest instrument built in silicon carbide, Gaia also comprises the largest billion-pixel CCD focal plane ever conceived.

Shipped out from Europe in August, the launch countdown started at t-11 hours. At t-30 min, all systems were go, and weather conditions were perfect. As dawn broke over the Atlantic coast of French Guiana, just outside Kourou, the final 10 second countdown began. Silence fell over the assembled spectators as lights began to flicker amongst the trees on the horizon, then the sky lit up, the ground rumbled beneath us, and the colossal Soyuz powered into the sky. Hidden for a few moments by a thin layer of cloud, Soyuz appeared majestically seconds later, carrying its celestial surveyor in an awesome display of terrifying power. At 170km altitude the upper stage continued to carry Gaia almost vertically upwards. At 38 min after lift-off, no longer visible but with its tell-tale vapour trail streaked across the sky, the launcher orientated the satellite in the direction of L2, before successfully releasing Gaia, now racing away from Earth. Already under the control of ESA’s space operations centre ESOC, in Germany, and just 77 minutes after launch, the next most critical phase of the satellite’s pioneering odyssey, was successfully executed – the deployment of the colossal 10m diameter solar array and sunshield.

It was a perfect injection into the transfer to L2. It will still be a 20-day journey to the isolated expanse of L2, where Gaia will be ‘parked’. From that location, a lengthy process of payload commissioning will precede the 5-year operational phase. Gaia’s goal: to revolutionise the understanding of our Galaxy, and the stars within it.

The most crucial and spectacular step in the execution of all space missions has been passed. After more than a decade of intense dedication, colossal effort, and vast ingenuity, the make-or-break moment of every space mission was decided, in Gaia’s favour, within just a few short minutes. As Arianespace Chairman and CEO, Stéphane Israel, described it “Gaia is a technological marvel, which should make Europe proud of its space industry”.

Acknowledgments and Disclaimer

GLObal Robotic telescopes Intelligent Array for e-Science (GLORIA) is a project funded by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2012) under grant agreement number 283783. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this website are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of EC or any Institution involved in the GLORIA project.